w00t! This thing is big! It comes with three 230mm fans. One on front, one on the side and the last one on the top. If that isn’t enough airflow, you can replace the side fan with four 120mm fans, and the top one with three 120mm fans. I’m going to stick with the default fans for now.

Ya, I hear you. No video card. I’ll be cannibalizing the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 out of my old system, which will have to get by with the on board graphics again. That and a 2 Gig 7200 RPM hard drive.

That should be enough to get me rolling and installing software. I’ve also got a multi card reader on order, but I can always add that later on, especially since that seems to be the long pole in the shipping wait. The old system will eventually end up in the basement, hooked up to the TV for the display and a wireless keyboard/trackball. It’s got enough horse power to make a good music/movie server, and given the big screen on the TV, hopefully a decent device for stray web surfing.

[…] My goto laptop is my 13″ MacBook Air, which I’m not planning on replacing anytime soon. Ya, the batteries are on the downside of the curve, but Apple can replace those for approximately $150. That is a lot cheaper than purchasing a new laptop I don’t need (I do the heavy computing and storage tasks on my home build Windows system). […]